As President Trump is on the brink of achieving the biggest legislation milestone of his presidency in the form of tax cuts, it appears some members of the mainstream media are coming to the bitter realization that despite their daily frantic assaults on the president, Donald Trump is steamrolling his agenda forward.
In an article from Politico, which is no fan of Donald Trump, writer Andrew Harnik asks the question, “Has Trump made approval polls meaningless?” The author goes on to list the many talking points that the mainstream media has used in attempt to thwart Donald Trump’s presidency, listing occurrences and statements that should have ended the career of any ordinary politician long ago.
“He is the most disliked president ever at this point in his term. And he’s more consequential than presidents who were twice as popular,” Harnik writes.
The reader can almost imagine a burnt-out liberal journalist typing away at this story, eagerly recounting the many times he believed his nightmare was over and President Trump was finally defeated, only to wake up to the stark realization that not only is Trump still president, but he is successfully moving his agenda forward as the economy rockets back to life after 8 years of Obama.
It’s been just another 24 hours or so in the alternate political universe where we dwell. The president of the United States has retweeted incendiary—and some inauthentic—videos of supposed Muslim depredations that brought angry words from America’s oldest ally, and even from INFOWARS—home of Alex Jones’ conspiracy theories. His press secretary says it really doesn’t matter whether the videos are true or false. In another tweet, Trump implied that Joe Scarborough may have killed someone in his office—a death investigators have unequivocally ruled a tragic accident stemming from a heart condition—and hints at something sinister about a top NBC News executive.
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And none of this will affect the fact that this looks like a week of major victories for the president and his agenda.
The stock market keeps breaking records, and the latest gross domestic product data show that the real economy is roaring, too. The tax cut bill—despite being about as popular as North Korea—moved significantly closer to Senate passage on Wednesday, as Republican senators on the fence swallowed their doubts and voted to move it to the floor for a Thursday vote.
Only in the isolated world of the mainstream media do Trump’s tweets and statements appear world-ending. In much of mainstream America, the president’s supporters are having a blast each and every day due to Trump’s actions and words.
The author continues to portray a picture of a president who, in the eyes of the mainstream media at least, is making the absolute worst decisions, stacking his administration with the worst types of people and is literally destroying the country on a daily basis.
Despite the media’s grim outlook on each and every one of Trump’s decisions, the economy and average working class Americans who are finally seeing their lives improve would beg to differ.
To the media, pundits and politicians polling numbers mean everything. They live and die by the polling data, often crafting their entire campaign’s messaging based on focus groups and poll numbers. However, when once-reliable polls were giving Hillary Clinton a 98% to win the election and not only did she lose, she lost badly, then the media’s world that they have carefully created for themselves over the past decades began to fall apart. Despite this failure to predict Trump’s victory last year, media pundits were convinced that his win was a fluke. An anomaly in polling that would never happen again.
Well, it appears they are beginning to realize their coveted “public opinion polls” may not be painting an accurate picture of American voters and their sentiment regarding Trump.
All of this—and much, much more—is happening under a president who, month after month, earns the lowest job-approval ratings of any first-year president, and whose policies—from taxes to health care to immigration to the environment—are rejected by thumping majorities of Americans.
How is this possible? How could a historically unpopular president be in a position to preside over more consequential changes, at least at this stage in their terms, than presidents like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama who were elected with clear electoral mandates?
“How is this possible,” the author asks. The answer to that question is clear to many of Trump’s supporters, yet it seems the media is just as clueless regarding middle-America as they were the day Trump won the election. Just as the polls were unable to truly grasp the level of support for Trump during the election, they are totally incapable of delivering an accurate picture of his approval ratings while in office. If any liberal journalist wants to get a feel for how Trump’s base is reacting to his decisions, then they should be reading the stories and comments sections on conservative websites where the president’s supporters gather and interact on a daily basis. By reading the comments on these sites, you can see that Trump voters are just as supportive of the president as the day they voted for him, but are disgusted with establishment Republicans, Democrats who want nothing more than to sabotage Trump’s agenda and distrust of the mainstream media for their constant barrage of frantic propaganda headlines attempting to drive a wedge between Trump and his supporters.
If members of the anti-Trump media have been progressing through the 5 stages of grief since the election, which some suggest they are, than it appears this Politico writer is slowly entering the “acceptance” phase. Perhaps some media pundits are realizing that large swaths of Americans aren’t listening to them anymore, but they are listening to Trump, and he has more power in a single tweet than all of their networks do combined.
Finally, the Politico author leaves some hope for his liberal readers (as well as reassuring himself), as he insists that it’s still possible that someone, somewhere and at some time, will do something about President Trump which will result in him being removed from office.
The terrain I’ve described is not immutable. It is possible that at some point, the president’s behavior will reach so blatantly dangerous a level that his party’s elders will seek to fashion some way to entice or drag him back from the ledge. But if you look at what the president has done on a near-daily basis over the past nine months, and watch those flat-lined approval numbers and the feckless Republican response to his behavior, you may have to ask yourself: What could that behavior be? At this point, should the president in fact wander onto Fifth Avenue with a Smith & Wesson, his party will offer up heartfelt tributes to the Second Amendment.
While the mainstream media journalists and political elites may be appalled at Trump’s actions and words, there are millions of Americans who are loving every minute of his presidency, including his groundbreaking tweets. This is because for the first time in a generation, a US president is finally saying what millions of voters have been thinking for years, but have never had much of a voice in politics.
As a reader, you get a sense of the author’s desperation and frustration with the “feckless” Republicans who, in his opinion, should have joined with the Democrats and impeached Trump as soon as he took office for no other reason than in their opinion he should never have won. Ironic, since many Trump voters share the author’s opinion in regards to the “feckless” Republicans in Congress, but for a very different reason. They are frustrated with Republicans in Congress who refuse to support Trump’s agenda and attempt to derail progress at every turn. The very same agenda that more than 60 million Americans voted for when they cast their votes for Donald Trump.